NAS over Wi-fi

mvnjpy · #1 11-11-2012, 04:20 PM

Hi, I'm trying to understand a bit what is my achievable best performance using a Synology NAS connected to Gigabit, but used over Wi-fi.

I'm hoping to be able to do something like 50mb/s read/writes from my macbook.

So, from a bit of research it seems hard drives can do usually 50-150mb/s, so that's not the problem. The Synology 212j NAS also shows performance data around 50mb/s.

I currently have the e4200v2 router. From the tests on this website, it says that LAN to WAN is 234.5mbps which is about 30mb/s. That seems to be the limiting factor. Or am I interpreting this number wrong?

Also, why is it that older routers have much better LAN/WAN performance?

Anyone have recommendations on router/NAS combinations for this sort of setup?

Note: I can write to my drive at ~25mb/s, which seems like the limit for USB 2.0. However, when the USB is connected to me e4200v2 router, the USB only does 10mb/s..

stevech · #2 11-12-2012, 01:14 AM

difficult/impossible to get 50Mbps with non-exotic WiFi.
Assuming one or more walls in the path, and not using 40MHz (not viable in populated areas), then about 20-30Mbps is do-able. 10-20Mbps is more typical.
Divide Mbps by 8 to get megaBytes/sec (MBps)

Mind your units: Mbps and MBps, such as where you say "it seems hard drives can do usually 50-150mb/s"

WiFi with a good signal strength BOTH DIRECTIONS, can do Netflix type streaming, but IMO, 1080p and likely 1080i video streaming isn't practical.
Moving gigabyte sized files via WiFi is s-l-o-w.

claykin · #3 11-12-2012, 09:53 AM

50MB/s is not going to happen with current consumer wifi technology. Best you'll get (assuming you had 5Ghz 802.11AC on both ends) is ~20MB/s. Since there's no 802.11AC clients yet, you can only effectively use AC to bridge between two wired devices.

When looking at performance for your E4200V2 please look at wifi radio performance. You'll see numbers closer to ~10-13MB/s.

Also when connecting your USB disk to the E4200V2 you are limited by the E4200V2 internal processing power and if you are trying to r/w over wifi (see above), you're also limited by wireless throughput. Its typical for USB disks to run slow(er) when connected directly to a wifi router.